A person's “social network” can be defined as a set of inter-personal relationships that characterize a person's life. A person's social network can also be defined as that person's set of primary, habitual, long-term communication partners. A person's “full” social network can be composed of many, possibly overlapping, smaller social networks, where many, if not all, of the smaller social networks are defined by a shared experience (e.g. attendance at a specific school), familial relationship (e.g. brothers), interest (e.g. fast cars), belief (e.g. a particular religion), genealogy (e.g. family members), goal (e.g. losing weight), location (e.g. a particular neighborhood) and so forth.
A “virtual” social network can be defined as one aspect of the manifestation of a full social network, in which interpersonal communication is achieved by “impersonal” means, rather than through face-to-face exchanges of information.
An online social network can be defined as a virtual social network, or a part thereof, in which information is exchanged by members of that social network through the electronic transmission, and/or exchange, of digital data across the Internet, or across an equivalent or similar electronic and/or electromagnetic medium.
Some social networks are intended to promote non-specific social interactions, e.g. Facebook (which is a general online social network) and MySpace (which is also a general online social network). Others are intended to facilitate specialized types of interactions. For instance, some social networks are intended to help business people promote themselves, their services and/or their businesses. An example thereof is LinkedIn, which is an online social network dedicated to promoting “business and professional networking.” Some social networks promote the interaction, and mutual support, of people who have all shared, or are all sharing, a common type of hardship. An example thereof is CaringBridge, which is a charitable nonprofit organization offering free personalized websites to people facing a serious medical condition or hospitalization, undergoing medical treatment and/or recovering from a significant accident, illness, injury or procedure. Its functionality is similar to a blog. And, some are designed to coordinate and support the efforts, and share the work, of people who share a common passion. Examples thereof are Care2 (“green living and social activism”) and Flickr (dedicated to sharing photos). Some social networks promote other types of topic-specific or domain-specific social interactions.
Many times, social networks that are created and marketed with a specific stated intent, such as to provide an online community for racing car enthusiasts, are utilized by their members for a different purpose, such as to exchange tips for raising vegetables in an arid environment. Despite their stated purposes, the unifying themes of social networks created online, within particular web sites, are typically determined solely by the users communicating within those social networks.
New social networks, and social networks intended to address novel needs, arise with great frequency. One of the greatest hindrances to the greater adoption and utility of social networks is the lack of adequate security and privacy, both perceived and real. There is a long-felt need for secure social networks in which only users, and the “friends” that those users specify, are able to gain access to the users' personal and/or private data. By limiting access to a user's PID (“personally identifiable data or information”) to the user who created it, and to the friends of that user, both the real and the perceived privacy and security of that potentially sensitive information are increased.
Online social networks (OSN's) represent one specialized version of more general data sharing (systems or) networks (DSS's). Many organizations require the ability to share data among and between their members. For instance, many businesses must archive and share digital information among their employees, for instance, data regarding past and current clients, company policies and resources, documentation of procedures and methods, etc. Many governmental organizations must archive and share digital information among their staff, for instance, memos, analyses, projections, policies and directives. Many law enforcement agencies must archive and share digital information related to criminal investigations, suspects, tips, etc. Even some large health care organizations must archive and share digital information among doctors and staff related to patients, the results of medical tests and procedures, insurance claims and policies, etc.
And, as with the users of OSN's, the organizations and people who use these more general DSS's tend to be concerned about the vulnerability of their data, and the criminal and civil repercussions which could follow any penetration of their DSS's by hackers. Again, there is a long-felt need among many businesses and organizations for a DSS which can better protect the security and privacy of their data.
Any other user within a DSS with which any other particular user agrees to communicate and share data will be referred to herein as a “contact” or “friend” of that user. And the set of users with which any particular user of a DSS agrees to share personal information will be referred to as the “contacts” or “friends” of that user.
DSS's are varied in their central themes, objectives and user interface designs. However, most DSS's share certain server functionalities. Most DSS's today provide users with many or all of the following:
(1) The ability to create and share a “profile” about one's self to help to identify, and to differentiate, one's self from other members of the DSS (especially true with respect to OSN's). These profiles typically aid in the discovery of other members of an OSN which any particular user may wish to add as a friend.
(2) The ability to post and share comments about one's self and/or about one's friends.
(3) The visual and/or organizational discrimination of media by type. For instance, in an OSN, there is often a section, that is, a partition of each user's data within that DSS, dedicated to the storing of photos, the creation of albums of photos, the generation, storage and display of comments regarding individual photos, etc. In a DSS, there are often sections related to categorical subjects such as documents of various types (e.g. policies, letters, memos, reports, etc.), particular people (e.g. clients, patients, criminals, victims, etc.), particular places, etc.
(4) The ability to upload and share media, such as photos and videos.
(5) The ability to access, view and comment on media posted by one's self and one's friends.
(6) The automated generation and receipt of notifications regarding the activities of one's self and one's friends.
(7) The ability to exchange private messages with one's friends.
(8) The chronological ordering and/or automated expiration of user created and/or uploaded media. Social, as well as professional, interactions are typically facilitated by prioritizing the presentation to users of the most recent, or most recently edited or amended media. Also, many types of social media, such as comments and automated notifications tend to lose their relevance to users within a social context as time passes. So, the automated hiding or deletion of such “old” media tends to increase the satisfaction of users of a DSS.
(9) Usually in a seamless and transparent manner, tools are needed to create, view, edit, upload, transmit and so forth the relevant types of media (such as text, email, audio, photos and videos) which are typically stored and/or exchanged within a DSS. This also often includes the provision of the means for engaging in real-time communications, e.g. text and/or video chat.
Many companies offer social networks or the software with which people may implement their own social networks. For instance, currently popular social networks include: Facebook, MySpace, Google+, LinkedIn and others. There are also companies, open source projects and other sources, which endeavor to provide the tools for individuals, and/or groups, to establish their own social networks. Often these tools result in the creation of “distributed,” and/or “peer-to-peer,” social networks, in which centralized servers are replaced with loose networks of geographically-distant cooperating servers. These companies/projects include: Elgg (which is an open source social networking software that provides individuals and organizations with the components needed to create an online social environment); Appleseed (which is the first open source, fully decentralized social networking software); and OneSocial Web (whose project aims to define a language to bridge these networks and make it easy for social networks to join a bigger social web).
There are companies which offer special-purpose online repositories of user data. The data stored within these online repositories is often encrypted with a company-supplied encryption key. These encrypted online repositories of user data, and an associated program running on a user's local computing device, are often used to automatically “back up” the contents of the user's hard drive(s) so that the data stored on such hard drive(s) can be restored should the hard drive(s) become non-functional, or be lost or stolen. These online repositories of encrypted user data are typically not shared and so are unable to facilitate social interactions between people. For these and other reasons, these online repositories of encrypted data do not provide the functionality which characterizes most social networks.
Companies, such as Dropbox, offer other types of online repositories which are intended to be shared between two or more users. These “communal” online repositories serve as shared data storage locations which may be associated with virtual folders, or directories, on the local computing device(s) of each associated user. The shared user data is typically stored on the local computing device(s) of each of the sharing users, as well as on one or more centralized data storage devices belonging to the company providing the service. The “mirrored” data, distributed among the user data stores, and the centralized data store(s), is typically kept synchronized, so that a change in any one user's data store can quickly be implemented in the data stores of each of the other users, as well as on the centralized data store(s).
The data stored on the computing devices of users is typically not encrypted (unless the user encrypts it). However, the data stored on the centralized storage device(s), and the data transmitted across the Internet, is often encrypted. The data storage company typically provides the encryption key used to achieve the encryption, and this intermediate state of encryption is typically hidden from the user. In fact, the user is usually unaware of the encryption method and the value of the encryption key used.
The computers, servers and/or programs of the centralized shared data storage web sites are often in possession of the encryption key(s) used to encrypt the user data, and are often able at any time to decrypt and examine that data. In fact, these sites regularly compare the unencrypted data in their stores, with the data stored on the users' computing, and/or storage devices, in order to detect any differences that need to be shared with the other users who have access to that data.
Users of these communal online repositories are able to share files of data, which can include photos, movies, audio files, text documents and so forth. And, users who elect to share one of these communal online repositories are often notified of any changes to the contents of the shared repositories, or to the contents of the individual files stored within those repositories. However, this is typically the extent of the “social” functionality provided by these companies, and this functionality is typically only provided to the extent that it facilitates the sharing of digital computer files among and between their users.
Technology able to facilitate the sharing of information across long distances has become more and more sophisticated over time. One can argue that the first “data sharing systems” were post offices which primarily delivered packets of hand-written information to the addresses specified on the envelopes. Later came the telegraph, allowing textual information to be quickly delivered to a specified recipient. And, later still, came the telephone which made possible the dynamic, and instantaneous, sharing of verbal information, and later digital information via modem. One might argue that the Internet represents the culmination of these earlier efforts in that it makes possible the near instantaneous sharing of a wide variety of data types on a global scale.
In modern terms, DSS's can generally be described as systematic means for the rapid exchange of digitally-encoded electronic data between, and within, a group of electronic computing devices. In such a DSS, some computing devices tend to be dedicated to the task of relaying digital data from one computing device to another. These types of computing devices are called “servers.” Other computing devices are typically used by individuals who wish to use the DSS to share data with other users of the DSS. The computing devices operated by these communicating users tend to be dedicated to the creation and transmission of data packets (DP) to be shared with other users, as well as to the receipt and presentation of DP shared by other users. These types of computing devices are called “clients.” And, in certain specialized DSS configurations (e.g. in “peer-to-peer” networks) computing devices may serve as both clients and servers.
One popular, and relatively new, type of DSS is the “online social network” (OSN), such as those discussed above. In an OSN, disparate groups of people who desire to communicate with one another are, by means of specialized programs and/or hardware, able to use their computing devices to share their own text, photos, videos, sound files, etc. with other users within the respective OSN-specific groups of people to which they belong (i.e. with their “friends”). They are also thereby able to receive and experience similar types of data generated and shared by their friends. “Facebook,” “Google+” and “LinkedIn” are popular and well-known OSN's.